Study Hints That Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility 307
Pierre Bezukhov submits news of a report that "a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility," writing
"'[The scientists who conducted the research] placed healthy sperms under a laptop running a Wi-Fi connection. After four hours, the Wi-Fi exposed sperms showed 'a significant decrease in progressive sperm motility and an increase in sperm DNA fragmentation' compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer. That is, the sperms exposed to Wi-Fi were less capable of moving towards an egg to fertilize it and less capable of passing on the male's DNA if it does fertilize an egg.' The scientists blamed the damage on non-thermal electromagnetic radiation generated by the Wi-Fi."
However, the experiment was based on sperm outside the body; the researchers (here's the abstract from their study) note that "Further in vitro and in vivo studies are needed to prove this contention."
Its a study that admits its incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
and still people will use this as FUD for the next 3 decades.
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You know, you're right. After reading TFA, you're even more right. Then again, I normally don't stick anything like wi-fi antenna's next to my sack. But considering the fetishes of some people out there, I'm sure this will be the next hot thing.
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As if it matters. This study doesn't indicate any long term damage only making the current crop of sperm impotent. Just dump a load and start to replenish stocks and the effect is gone.
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It is a given fact that once you get wifi you will have internet everywhere, this will translate to porn everywhere, this will translate to constant.... excercise that will lower sperm count... so yes! Wifi causes infertility!
Insufficient data. (Score:5, Funny)
They don't say what the compute was displaying. Porn has been known to effect the movement of sperms.
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Is this obligatory; http://xkcd.com/326/ [xkcd.com]? I can never tell...
This calls for... (Score:5, Funny)
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Awesome (Score:2, Funny)
Awesome I'm going to connect my jewels to the web!
Maybe then my wife won't keep pestering me to get snipped.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Go ahead and do it. It's been five years for me and it's great. Everything still works.
Of course, don't even consider it unless you already have children and you are in a long-term committed and successful relationship.
Nowadays, they do it with laser beams and you don't have have sore nuts for a week or anything. My doctor gave me a tootsie pop (seriously) after he was done and it was great! I'd go do it again, but it would be kind of redundant, I think. Man, I loved that tootsie pop. It was the grape, which is my favorite.
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See... you almost had me convinced to get one done until you told me the tootsie pop was grape flavour.
I can risk the low-potential for impotence and inability to reach the "o"- but I can't risk getting a grape tootsie-pop over a different flavour.
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And remember that half of all long-term committed and successful relationships are still going to fail, and that having had your children, you've put yourself in the category of more likely to fail due to the increased stress.
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Well, marriage is pretty much the agreed upon societal definition for committed.
Long-term is a hazier definition, I'd agree.
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A correct vasectomy is 100% effective. The pussy ones that are reverse-able are the ones that are not.
My doc cut out 1/2 inch of Vas on each, and then cauterized the ends, folded them over and tied them. they would have to untie each other, flip back and regrow a large distance to lose any effectiveness.
Guys should man up and get a real vasectomy instead of the pussy out version that is reversible. Real men get snipped, it's the lesser men that refuse to.
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Real men get snipped, it's the lesser men that refuse to.
Thank Goodness not all men are real then or the species would die out. ;)
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by the way, the world population will peak around 2075 and then decline, it's quite clear from the second derivative of the population growth curve. so, if you're straight and have found the ideal woman, man up, take care of a woman and her and your offspring for life.
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There's no way to guarantee you won't be in the .15% whose vasectomies fail, so saying it's 100% effective is misleading. Also, there are a handful of cases of spontaneous healing of the gap in that .15%, so it's not even 100% for correctly implemented vasectomies.
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>Guys should man up and get a real vasectomy
If it ain't fixed, don't break it.
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.
Trust me on this - it's painful and annoying.
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After the C-section and before they sew her back up is the best time to have your wife's tubes tied.
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.
Ok - just kidding. It was 20-odd years ago, so I guess they don't have a sodding great bit of nylon poking through the cervix any more. It was a very memorable injury, though.
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If we wanted a permenant solution. Yes.
However- we're both young- both early 30s- whereas a vasectomy is sometimes reversible- it isn't 100%.
If God forbid something happened to our kids or my wife- I can seea scenario where I might want to have kids again- or have kids with a new wife if something bad happened to my wife,
An IUD is at least reversible and a better idea in my mind.
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What if he wants to get some other woman pregnant? Just because his wife doesn't want any more children, and he wants a way to pacify her doesn't mean he should get snipped.
Good (Score:3)
Free contraception!
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Didn't work for me...
They're claiming it's not thermal damage (Score:5, Insightful)
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Should be easy to rule that out by using a USB wifi dongle on an extension near one sample, and a temperature-controlled object of the same size over the control (those dongles do heat up a little bit, not much, but you gotta be sure).
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Isn't the body of the laptop just a really big EMF shield anyway? So the one place where you wouldn't have exposure to the wifi signal is the underside?
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Not really. In fact most newer laptop bodies are nearly 100% plastic, they only have a little metal in the hinges, no metal frames like in years gone by.
Although most newer ones with removable underplates that give you full access to the internals also have a layer of aluminum foil sheeting on the underplate to help keep the bottom cool, that would probably shield anything under the laptop from the wifi antennas in the screen.
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"...compared to healthy sperm stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer." So, if they didn't just screw up (always a possibility), the difference in motility cannot be due to the increased temperature near the laptop.
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Well they said that they have already controlled the temperature to be the same in each test.
So either their methods are hopelessly flawed or this result doe snot have to do with heat.
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It is now.
Re:They're claiming it's not thermal damage (Score:5, Informative)
They actually aren't claiming anything. I tracked down the paper (which was fucking harder than it should have been, the article didn't cite anything but the journal and month - turns out it was in the supplemental issue from September, not the main journal). The real citation is:
A. Van-Gheem, J. Martin, L. Penrose, N. Farooqi, S. Prien, Short-term exposure to cell phone levels of radio frequency radiation do not appear to to influence semen parameters in vitro, Fertility and Sterility, Volume 96, Issue 3, Supplement, September 2011, Page S155, ISSN 0015-0282, 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2011.07.610.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028211017079)
I wonder why the article didn't cite it? Maybe because in the title itself, it says "do not appear to influence". Anyway, turns out it's not a real paper, it's really just a blurb about "We did this and it turns out nothing happened".
Here's the results section:
Re:They're claiming it's not thermal damage (Score:5, Informative)
there are two papers: the Van-Gheem et.al. paper you cite and then there is the
one the slashdot article is about, which is:
Use of laptop computers connected to internet through Wi-Fi decreases human sperm motility and increases sperm DNA fragmentation. by Avendaño C, Mata A, Sanchez Sarmiento CA, Doncel GF.
The authors are the Argentineans which the linked article mentions.
It's (to be) published in Fertility and Sterility.
So I basically don't know what you're going on about ...
Meh (Score:3)
Non-AC'd cars, cell phones, now wi-fi...but I'm not worried. You only need to conceive a child a few times in your whole life anyways, worst-case scenario, you forgo the motorcycle and the big TV and lay down the cash for an artificial insemination procedure.
(Can feel mom's hopes for grandchildren fading...)
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Back in the 1970s tight underpants and tight jeans used to be the big threat to male fertility. Health scares move with the times.
Put a kilt on (Score:2)
Back in the 1970s tight underpants and tight jeans used to be the big threat to male fertility.
So I guess if a man wants to conceive, he should start wearing a kilt [wikimedia.org], a sarong [wikipedia.org], a thobe/dishdasha/caftan [wikimedia.org], or something else that gives more room down there. Yet too many men are too uncertain of their masculinity to wear anything but trousers.
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Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Most things placed near testes tend to decrease male fertility.
Briefs, jeans, angry women...
Only the Strong Shall Survive! (Score:3)
May all the weak Wi-Fi afflicted sperm perish as their superior Wi-Fi resistant brethren overtake the womb!
Wavelength (Score:3)
How is a signal with a wavelength of 5" (wifi is around 2.4 GHz, 2.4E9/3E8*39.37in/m=4.9") supposed to interact with a human sperm, which, according to wikipedia, is comprised of a head 5 um long and a tail 41 um long, all of which total 0.002 inches. These arguments never ever make any sense to me.
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Wavelength. By this logic, you wouldn't be able to hit a badger with a javelin?
Of course, that's probably a terrible analogy. I never took much in the way of physics.
Re:Wavelength (Score:4, Interesting)
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Touche, AC, and I agree with you, but as you point out (and I neglected to) the interaction between the RF generated by a microwave and water is a thermal reaction.
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Temperature is a measure of how much jiggling is going on, not a basic characteristic.
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This subthread seems to be a great hangout for EEs who don't understand physics.
Your "compelling explanation" is not an explanation, but a statement of the effect. The explanation for the effect is *precisely* that the EM wave causes the polar molecules to jiggle in response, thus heating them, and the Newtonian reaction to that is that the jiggling molecules themselves create EM waves which are out-of-phase with the primary wave and hence attenuate it through interference. Thus, from a macro point of vie
More Wi-Fi! (Score:2)
Not buying it. (Score:2)
In addition to the usual arguments about wave and particle energy density of light in the radio spectrum, there's another reason this result is extremely unlikely to be true: sperm are not built out of custom parts. Other parts of the body, for example the inside of the lungs, contain beating filaments which are almost identical (except for length and pattern of motion) to the tails of sperm.
If wifi caused serious problems with sperm motility, it would also cause very obvious respiratory problems or other
Stupid (Score:2)
Niche Market? (Score:2)
For lead lined pants ... Anyone in ?
Yeah, right (Score:5, Interesting)
I take reports of damage to cells in a dish with a grain of salt. This isn't a natural environment for the cells, and it is incredibly easy to harm them accidentally in a variety of ways. When the phenomenon is unlikely to begin with (damage to cells from photons that individually don't carry enough energy to produce lasting changes in any biological molecule), place your bets on "artifact."
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If only there were some way to control for such factors.
ye olde fertility joke (Score:2)
What do you call couples that practice the testicular WiFi-proximity method of birth control?
parents!
There's an App for that. (Score:2)
Promies, promises... (Score:2)
I sit with my laptop on my lap WiFi'ing all the time. And I've got three children 4 and under.
Promises, promises...
What I'd give for a viable non-surgerical male birth control option.
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A poorly controlled experiment (Score:4, Interesting)
All computers emit RF radiation when they're running, whether or not they even have WiFi installed. Regulations require manufacturers to limit this radiation, but it's still there; and with a computer in very close proximity to a test subject, (spermatozoon, human, or otherwise), it's probably a toss-up as to whether any effects attributable to RF radiation are a result of WiFi, or of the 1GHz+ processor, the switching power supplies, and any of several other possible sources of radio frequency energy.
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Trolling aside, this experiment doesn't sound like it had a control group, ie a laptop with no wi-fi being held over your balls. Heat in that area is known to decrease fertility. The experiment as described in the summary has nothing to do with wi-fi.
(no, I didn't RTFA).
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Nor, it seems, did you RTFS.
Quote, with relevant portion highlighted:
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Informative)
"Non-thermal electromagnetic radiation" means that electromagnetic radiation caused the effect through a nonthermal mechanism. It's a common idea in EM fear circles (because the output from EM devices is too low to cause damage by a thermal mechanism). It doesn't say anything about heat, one way or another. You can have thermal damage from EM radiation without any application of heat. That's what your microwave oven does.
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Thanks for explaining the difference. I hadn't thought through the subtleties.
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To quote:
compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer
That looks like it says a lot about heat to me, of course, I understand that you are thinking about the amount of heat put off by a laptop but it seems like they controlled for this by putting the wifi close but not putting the laptop directly on top of the sperm.
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I'm not sure that the "same temperature" is really what they measured. All the abstract says is that they were incubated under the same conditions.
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Interesting)
However the control was NOT a laptop with the wifi turned off but a setting with no exposure to electrical equipment at all. Which is not a control for WiFi but a control for a "Laptop with Wifi on".
Which leads me to think that the reason they chose this setup was that they couldn't get a useful result when using a laptop without WiFi as a control. The effect could in theory be caused by any part or combination of parts inside the laptop.
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Maybe I'm not as up to date with the fancy physics talk as I use to (or even should) be, but going back to my old college courses...
Isn't 'thermal' fancy physics talk for 'heat'?
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Yes, but it also has more nuanced meanings, and there's one that is very pertinent to this field.
wrong! (Score:2)
A microwave oven works by passing non-ionizing microwave radiation, usually at a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz (GHz)—a wavelength of 122 millimetres (4.80 in)—through the food. Microwave radiation is between common radio and infrared frequencies. Water, fat, and other substances in the food absorb energy from the microwaves in a process called dielectric heating. Many molecules (such as those of water) are electric dipoles, meaning that they have a partial positive charge at one end and a partial negative charge at the other, and therefore rotate as they try to align themselves with the alternating electric field of the microwaves. Rotating molecules hit other molecules and put them into motion, thus dispersing energy. This energy, when dispersed as molecular vibration in solids and liquids (i.e., as both potential energy and kinetic energy of atoms), is heat.
(emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Principles [wikipedia.org]
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So, wait one. What you seem to be saying is, if we want to stop nerds from reproducing, all we need to do is pop them in the microwave? Seems a bit of repetitive redundancy, doesn't it? I mean, how many nerds are going to breed, anyway?
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No, it means you have damage from "non-thermal radiation" i.e. something other than infrared. Wifi is nicely in the microwave range that has peak absorption by water molecules so it will effectively heat up anything wet. Which sperm (not sperms, editors) are. The researchers didn't do anything to protect the sperm against microwave heating.
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That made me wonder who had to clean off the thermometers, or did they just measure air temp?
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Informative)
The abstract specifically states that the control group was a set of identical samples, under the same incubation regime, without the laptop. So no, they didn't control for the idea that the laptop alone could've caused the effect
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Oh, the scientists blamed the damage on non-thermal effects! Gosh, I guess that settles it, then!
Remember, budding young scientsts, if someone tries to refute your conclusion by pointing to confounding factor X, all you have to do is "blame non-X"! Problem solved! No need for that fancy shmancy "control group" business. Just BLAME something else!
(Never mind that they didn't test a non-wifi laptop to see if a non-wifi laptop aspect -- like heat -- could have been responsible for these effects...)
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the kicker - they ran the laptop with the wifi switched off, but only measured the RF output of the laptop [msn.com] in that state. They didn't perform - or performed, but didn't publish - the obvious control experiment.
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What? It says right in the summary: compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:4, Insightful)
Therefore did not test to see if any gasses released from the plastics in the laptop could be the effect. They are testing cells exposed to the environment not inside of it's intended sealed container.
Lots of variables they did not account for.
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Entirely possible. But he didn't say 'other variables', he said 'heat', which they did account for.
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You should indeed RTFA: "A separate test also showed that merely placing sperm near a computer (without Wi-Fi) does not cause nearly the same damage."
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:5, Informative)
That news report is wrong. The seperate test in question evaluated the RF output of a laptop with its wifi switched off, but it did not measure sperm motility after exposure to that laptop:
"A separate test with a laptop that was on, but not wirelessly connected, found negligible EM radiation from the machine alone."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45469130/ns/health-mens_health/#.TtT0PlabUlT [msn.com]
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Yes, yes it does matter. You have just begged the question (by the real meaning).
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Not sure about this article, but another article I read did say that they had a laptop with WiFi disabled and a second control with no laptop at all and didn't see the drops that they saw on the WiFi laptop.
My complaint would be that one does not usually store one's sperm directly under the laptop. There's usually some flesh between the laptop and the sperm. Would that flesh be enough to absorb the WiFi radiation? I'm thinking probably since WiFi's penetration is only millimeters. A few millimeters of s
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And it's as accurate as the "hottubbing makes you infertile" fake stories from the 80's, 90's,00's and 10's...
At least in a hottub my nuts are kept at 108-110 degrees for 1-2 hours 3 times a week. far FAR more of a temperature rise for a far longer time than any heat from a laptop can generate.
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The Atari 130XE and collection of sci-fi novels my dad gave me access to probably did long-term damage to my fertility.
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But do Half-Life and Half-Life 2 make a full life? (Score:2)
Natural selection
If you spend too much time on the computer, you're not having a full life.
But surely you're at least having a half life, because the subject of your comment also happens to be the title of the Half-Life mod [wikipedia.org] whence "How do I shot web?" originated.
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Re:Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
You could bedazzle your balls with aluminum sequins, that will maintain full sack flexibility while guarding your nuts from the wifi waves, and you'll have DISCO BALLS! XD
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Man, I don't want to see what happens when a pejazzler meets a vajazzler...
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Just to play devil's advocate (not that I accept the study - I think it's flawed), one data point does not equal proof. Perhaps your sperm count would have been 600 million had you not been using the laptop.
I do agree that the heat is likely a bigger issue than any WiFi radiation.
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This study doesn't claim it had an effect on count. How was your motility rating?
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